‘Bourne Legacy’ decent but pointless

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Sasha McBrayer
Film critic

POSTED:August 21, 2012 4:00 p.m.

There have been four Jason Bourne films, but the recently released “The Bourne Legacy” is the first one that doesn’t star Matt Damon.

Your new action hero is Jeremy Renner. If you don’t know him, you’re going to want to get to know the actor soon. He has joined many hot Hollywood franchises, including “The Avengers” and “Mission: Impossible.”

In “The Bourne Legacy,” which opened No. 1 last weekend at the box office, Renner plays Aaron Cross, a covert operative not unlike Bourne except in one crucial area: He’s genetically enhanced. That’s pretty funny to me, because throughout the beginning of the movie, I kept saying he looks an awful lot like Marvel Comics’ Wolverine.

The story occurs during the same timeline as the other films, which means Bourne is making big trouble for shadowy government bad guys. In response, they start killing all their operatives, as well as the scientists who genetically altered them. Can you guess who female lead Rachel Weisz is playing?

The good news is, the movie is better than I thought it would be. Renner and Weisz do pretty well with what they’re given. The bad news is, there’s no real purpose for this film. The Bourne trilogy was a moneymaker, and this was an effort to keep the cash flowing. That’s not a good enough reason to tell a story.

However, Time’s review of “The Bourne Legacy” criticized filmgoers for going to see blockbusters like this and asked if Americans are hungry for bad movies. I take issue with that idea. These are the pictures made available to us; not all of us boycott the theater until a real gem debuts.

All in all, I guess I’m a little bit of a fan …a little bit.

The worst thing about “The Bourne Legacy” is there’s no concrete resolution, which means you can probably expect two more really bad films.

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